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The Lives of the Poets

In A River of Words, the young William Carlos Williams trains to be a doctor but remains preoccupied by the pictures in his mind.

When I was 8 or 9 I copied a poem from a library book in loopy cursive and taped it to the wall over my bed. I was enchanted by Robert Frost’s catchy claim that he was “one of the children told” that “blowing dust” was “really gold.” But the real nugget for me was “the Golden Gate.” Frost and I were both born in San Francisco. And he, too, I learned with delight, had lived in Vermont, loved apple trees and bendy birches.

Though the lives of poets often remain mysteriously veiled during our earliest encounters with poetry, biographical details can provide an important bridge of accessibility for young readers. It wasn’t until college that I learned William Carlos Williams, another favorite, was a doctor. This New Jersey native, who had made a memorable word picture with a red wheelbarrow, chickens and rain, had helped change the way a new generation of writers thought about poetry. The fact that he also made house calls and presided over births added an extra dose of human appeal.

How Williams found his way to poetry and medicine is the subject of Jen Bryant and Melissa Sweet’s lively new biography for children, “A River of Words” (named a New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Book this year). Their nature-­loving “Willie Williams” is smart and athletic, and loves to listen to the music of the Passaic River as it goes “slipping and sliding over / the smooth rocks.” Alone in his room he writes lines, counting the beats and making the end-words rhyme.

But what preoccupies him are the “pictures in his mind” that don’t “fit” regular rhythms or rhymes. He’s drawn to “ordinary things — / plums, wheelbarrows and weeds, / fire engines, children and trees,” details cleverly integrated in Sweet’s multi­media illustrations.

Even as Williams studies to become a doctor, he meets Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle, and everywhere there are signs that his mind is at work on poems. His creative impulses are beautifully conveyed in Sweet’s collaged watercolor and pencil compositions, often layered over the covers of old clothbound books. Words are scribbled on ruled sheets, prescription pads, receipts. There are yellow-bellied birds “quarreling with sharp voices / over things / that interest them” and a house-call road map with a note: “They call me and I go.” Changing typography further animates the illustrations, as in a fiery collage of 5’s surrounding Williams’s firetruck poem (which inspired his friend Charles Demuth’s painting “The Figure 5 in Gold”). Flip to the lime-green end pages and you’ll find Williams’s seeds of inspiration fully sprouted as poems.

Sweet’s illustrations are playfully distracting — the eye hops sparrowlike from leaf to leaf, uncertain where to settle. But the narrative unfolds clearly and chronologically in graceful free verse. The child who “notices everything” as he walks through “the high grasses and along the soft dirt paths” follows in the footsteps of his physician uncle, but “could not stop writing poems.” Williams’s legacy as a trailblazer in 20th-century American po­etry is explained in a helpful author’s note, accompanied by a full chronology, at the end of the book.

“A River of Words” insightfully portrays the writing life. So much depends upon red-hot passion, lots of practice and putting it simply and vividly: “There is a bird in the poplars! / It is the sun!”

Emily Dickinson also employed metaphor, but she remained wedded to the music of metrics: “ ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers — / That perches in the soul.” “My Letter to the World: And Other Poems,” from Kids Can Press’s valuable “Visions in Poetry” series, is an elegant introduction to the work of that mysterious belle of Amherst (who died when Williams was 2).

While rereading Dickinson’s riddle-like lines, I was struck by the power of Isabelle Arsenault’s haunting and expressive visual interpretations. Her delicate color-washed drawings of a ghostlike Emily in her white dress, of doleful trees and marching ladies’ boots, depict a dreamlike 19th-century otherworld. Yet for all the muted tones (there’s plenty of black and gray), Arsenault avoids the dreary. Amid the shadows there’s lightness and humor to be found, and even Alice-in-Wonderland-­like antics as Emily tumbles lovesick from the sky, wearing a porcelain-­teacup skirt: “I cannot live with You — / It would be Life — / And Life is over there — / Behind the Shelf.”

Illumination opens this lovely selection (“There’s a certain Slant of light”) and closes it, too — Arsenault’s image of the perching bird that is “hope” glows in gold and orange hues. In between are Dickinson’s complex mortal musings, including “Because I could not stop for Death / He kindly stopped for me” and “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain.” So appealing are Dickinson’s short lines, rhymes and alliteration that music and meaning often emerge like small miracles: “How dreary — to be — Somebody! / How public — like a Frog — / To tell one’s name — the livelong June — / To an admiring Bog!”

Readers of all ages will indeed “judge tenderly” the poet who bares her soul here. Like “A River of Words,” this book ends with a biographical note, making it a helpful source for school projects. Emily’s “flurries of cryptic notes and letters” and the cache of nearly 1,800 poems found by her sister after her death (with only a handful published anonymously in her lifetime) are facts that enlarge one’s under­standing of this “nobody” who was in fact a very significant “somebody.”

For many people, the leap to reading poetry can be more than a little daunting, which makes it especially important to begin when we’re young and unafraid. These exquisite books should prompt a running start.